“That evil queen did a number on you, and if I ever get a chance to find who did that to you, I’ll hunt them, Treajure. I will hunt them and show them the same they have shown you. I promise you that. If there is a chance at finding them, I will get them.” He’s toned in destructive violence, the Wild in him flexing outward in a show of teeth. His Wild has been showing himself to me more and more. He’s even made a few attempts to nip at my skin before Cassius pulls the teeth away with a shake of his head.
Cassius doesn’t understand; the man would hunt him with silver and turn him into something caged and terrified. His body would be used for the man’s sick pleasure.
“Specs, you’ve come a long way, but I think you can go further. We could go further.” The heat of his hand sinks into my thigh. It’s all I can think about. The weight of him on me.
“We need to change, Specs.” He’s serious. So am I when I nod my head yes.
“I need to do something. I can’t live like this anymore.” Grief-stricken, Cassius takes a hard breath in. I can feel his voice, every inflection of sound skimming over my skin. He’s full of pain, full of misery, full of need.
“I have to change something.” The palm of my hand rests against the beat of his heart. I want to dig myself in there.
“We could change together. We could go further, together.” Words are spoken raw and truthful by him to me.
He’s all scorching fire, and I’m going to be the leftover ash. I know it. I can feel it. I’m afraid to be blown away from him. Please, don’t let me be blown away with his change.
Letter 5
Cash,
By now you already know these aren’t some undying love letters to you. Knowing you, I think you thought they would be, but knowing me now, you understand these aren’t going to be words that you pine over in the dark.
I’ve lost myself. I don’t really know who I am anymore. Who am I?
With Clayton it was easy. I was his as much as he was mine from my earliest memories, but with you, I’m your mate, but am I really yours? I honestly don’t think so. You’re upset reading this, I know. Sorry.
The look on your face last night was something I wasn’t prepared for, but I didn’t ever plan to have you ask me that question either. Why ask me things that are better left under our rug? I guess our rug can’t cover everything. Our pile has grown too big.
I’m sorry for wanting to kill Rya. It was like a baton struck me across the face and all I could taste was my own blood trickling down my throat because I knew this was not the same juvenile that left the pack. Rya was an adult wolf who had grown into her position. Luna. I fucking knew it as soon as I saw her in the office that day collecting the keys to the midwife’s house. I knew it, and I was terrified to have Clayton see her again. How do I compete with her? How? His mother couldn’t wipe that smile off her face. I was standing right in front of her and she couldn’t hide how happy she was that Rya was back.
She told me things were going to change. I just never knew how much. I had this growing fantasy that if I could kill Rya, then everything would go back to how it was really supposed to be. Clayton would be able to mark me and we would become a family as long as when I met my mate, he’d do the same thing. Kill him.
You asked me last night if I would have been happy if you died. I told you yes. Sorry, that hurt you. It hurt you a lot. I could see it all over your face. I thought you would be sick when you sat down on the chair. After a few minutes of not saying a word, you told me you were going to bed. I slipped in beside you later that night when I knew you would be asleep. You weren’t asleep, but you pretended to be. I know when you are really sleeping and when you’re not.
I was so jealous of Rya when she came back that all I thought about was killing her. How could I compete with her? I didn’t think a wolf could be that beautiful. The way she looked, her hair…but her eyes. Her fucking eyes were the blessing from the Moon herself. How could I compete with a wolf who was given the Moon’s blessing? I thought killing her would give me everything I wanted. How does love turn you into a monster? I justified it to myself. Killing her, killing you, would let Clayton and me be together forever. So I thought. I felt Clayton slipping further from me. I felt it; I knew it a little before Rya came back. But when she came back, I knew we were slipping further apart. It was a matter of time, and I couldn’t let go of him. I couldn’t even imagine my life without him in it.
Clayton and I were lying in bed the night she came home. I was curled into his body, and I asked him if he thought Rya was beautiful. He didn’t answer me for a few minutes. I knew deep down before he said a word that I was in trouble. He didn’t lie to me; he found her very attractive. He said she was a beautiful wolf, but it wasn’t her that he loved, it was me. That night we made love, slow love, the kind that you remember long after it’s over—it felt like goodbye.
You and I have never made love, and I’m afraid we never will now.
I asked you a few days ago what you thought of me, if you thought I was pretty. You told me I was the prettiest thing you ever saw. Ever. Then you opened your mouth back up and also told me looks are deceiving, and on the inside, I had an ugliness that made you turn into your own ugliness.
I’m afraid to look in the mirror anymore. I don’t want to see what’s inside of me. I fear it.
I see you, Cash. I see the inside of you, and I think there is an ugliness, and underneath that, there is a beauty that I never allowed myself to see.
Kennedy
Chapter 6
Blood can Drip from Words
Naked and bare, his open eyes look directly into mine.
“Why do I always find myself here?” The past de-focuses the pierce of his blue eyes. It’s never out of his head. Never. We almost always end up here, sitting in front of this house that isn’t standing anymore. Sometimes he tries to push the tears away; other times he lets the tears push out.
“I can see her. If I close my eyes, I can see it all.”
A pause. “She loved that house. Even to the end, she loved that house.” Raw words from a tightening voice.
“Kennedy loved him right to the end. Deep down, she couldn’t stop loving Clayton, and here I am unable to stop coming back to him.” He exhales. “I have to stop this.” My reply is unspeakable behind a wall of teeth.
“How do I stop?” A rebellious tear wants to squeeze from the side of my eye. I fight the need to cry for him. He doesn’t need my tears. He needs someone to listen to him when he decides to talk about Kennedy, about letting her go, so he can let himself go.
“You have this way of seeing through me. You see right through me. Like now, like the first night I met you. You had this look on your face that you knew exactly who I was. It scared the crap out of me. Did you know that?” I shake my head no.
He sighs, and I try not to squirm, because he’s now scratching blunt nails down the skin of my thigh.
“Sometimes I feel like I could tell you anything, and I want you to know you can tell me anything, too. I won’t judge you, like you never judge me, no matter how bad I get.” He looks at me as if reading every single facial feature I have.
“I wish I knew what you were thinking. There’s more to you than this. I know it.” When he says these kinds of things, it makes me feel that someone understands me; it makes me feel free to look around at the world or look at him. It’s hard to look at males, but Cassius has this way of making things easy to look at. Like the time he took me to my first barbecue at Caleb’s place. Belac left, and I just started to sleep under Cassius’s bed. I didn’t want to go. I hate crowds and the noise. I didn’t want to pee my pants again in front of people. It’s embarrassing even though no one makes a big deal about it. It’s a big deal to me. He let me scrunch his shirt in my hands the entire time. We sat there, and he talked to me the entire time about really nothing, but he talked and I listened. He didn’t like talking to the wolves, either. He gave them some grunts and short answers, but he didn’t want to socialize just as much as me. He was there
for the kids, not himself, and he told me if he had to go, then I had to go too. We could suffer together. Soon I looked forward to going to parties with him. It meant we sat close together and he would be free to talk to me about anything he wanted to. Most times it was the kids or asking if I liked the shirt he got me; he can never buy himself something new without getting something for the kids or now me something. He’s been buying all my clothes now. Caleb said he could do it, but Cassius told him no. On rare occasions he’d look at the dance floor and look at me, and I thought he’d ask me to dance. He never has, but recently he picked up Dee and had his first dance with his daughter in front of the pack, and Luna Grace cried while Caleb took a picture.
Ten minutes go by with the only noise coming from our lungs. He’s breathing through his nose, rough with haste.
“Change with me, Treajure.” Cassius’s voice is the only thing that disturbs the air inside the vehicle.
I’m holding my breath.
My hand is studied in his. He turns it this way and that, tracing a deeply scarred line that split the skin when it was made.
My wrist bone spindles underneath his touch, twisting in all the ways he moves my hand.
How do I change if my pieces aren’t broken, they’re missing? Lost. Buried treasure somewhere that even with a map it would be hard to find.
Our palms press with fingers outstretched. I compare the size before he weaves our fingers together.
“You have small hands,” he says as if noticing this for the first time. The pad of his index finger rubs at the webbing between my thumb and finger.
Every muscle in my body contracts. When everything unusually relaxes, I can’t stop the “hmmm” that comes out from somewhere deep.
“Do that again. Make that sound from here.” His breath lingers where the sound came out of. The edge of his thumb is pressed against my voice box, sliding up and down on the thin skin.
Arousal pits deep. Vision blurs.
It’s hard to focus on anything else besides him, his voice, his low breathing. I want to reach out, tug at his hair, feel the coarseness of his beard on my face. I want to rub myself against him. I want him to feel me.
I want to feel the rub of him.
A slow finger runs along the inside of my arm, and his nose touches the shell of my ear, skimming against the ruby earring.
“Do it again, Treajure.” His voice pitches even lower. His hand on my thigh doesn’t pull away. The weight of his warm palm soaks into the material of my pants.
A brazen shiver runs loose—without balance. The sensation is overloading.
“Hmmm.” The sound is said with eyes closed and thighs pressed together.
“I know you can talk, Specs. I know it.”
Opening my eyes, it’s impossible to move. He’s staring right into me.
I watch his lips as he pulls on an edge with peaked teeth. He might kiss me. I wait. He doesn’t.
“I need to change, Specs. I’m no good this way. I’m no good to anyone this way.” He shifts away from the space that I feel is my refuge.
A knock on the window is startling. Cassius’s emotions sluff off his face to be fixed with a blankness.
“Do I need to call Caleb, or will your father be needed?” The window isn’t rolled down, but we can hear Clayton clearly.
“You won’t have to call anyone,” Cassius says as he opens the door and steps out with shoulder attitude.
“Are you sure about that, Cash?” Clayton’s voice seems purposely controlled. Subdued even.
“I’m sure. I was just looking at the house.” There is nothing there when Cassius turns his head in the direction of the tall weeds.
Clayton scratches the side of his jaw with the edge of his thumbnail. He’s clean-shaven with a shaved head. It’s very rare that he makes the first move; it’s always Cassius.
“I have a question for you.” Cassius’s words are teeth bared. There is a subtle alert in the stiffening muscles on the side of Clayton’s neck. I watch from the backside of the truck, using the metal to block my body from two males who will fight, because there are thick things between them, like blood.
“What’s the question?”
“All the time you two were together, and look at you. All clean and shaved.” Cassius continues with teeth bared, words meant to bite into bones.
Clayton’s strides are efficient, confident, not vain.
Both of them seem to loom at the other. Their fight never seems to bleed out; there is always more blood to be spilled.
“What do you mean by that?” Clayton asks.
Cassius crowds into Clayton’s space.
“Let’s see,” Cassius says, “all the time with Kennedy and you can move on. You make it look simple. Easy even.”
There is a feeling of a trigger being pulled right before the explosion of sound.
Clayton fists both hands into Cassius’s shirt, pulling him close. Eye to eye.
Teeth bared, breathing flared.
“I haven’t moved fucking on.” Clayton’s words shake from his mouth, and spit flies from between clenched teeth.
“I’m not fucking over her.” Clayton struggles on his words; he sounds like an old wound reopening again. Words leak out like blood.
A torn second holds between them.
Clayton uncurls his fists from Cassius’s shirt.
“I have obligations. My sister needs me. My nephew needs me. The pack, whatever is left, needs me. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about everything. Not one day goes by that I don’t think about her. So don’t stand there and tell me things you know nothing about,” he snarls.
Clayton is still mostly an open flesh wound, stuffed with his own self-made tragedy.
“You took everything away from me. Everything.” Cassius’s blood drips now in words that come out like a split-open gut.
“No. You took everything from yourself.” Clayton points his finger in Cassius’s face. It’s met with a hard fist from Cassius.
Both of their bodies collide as their war spreads and tramples down the weeds underneath their bodies.
Blood and snarls mix.
“You were the one who let her die. Don’t blame me for what you did to her.” Clayton’s words hurtle the pain across Cassius’s face. The sad part is that Cassius accepts that as his truth; meeting him was her death.
“I loved her, and I thought she would be safe with you. I was wrong. That’s why I let her go with you. I thought you could be something to her.” Words strangle, blanching both their skins.
This is more a warring of blood-soaked words than scraped knuckles.
“You tore out her throat. How was that safe?”
“I didn’t do that. The Wild did. I would never hurt Kennedy. Ever.” There’s this feeling of a sputtering matchstick newly lit, the violence growing as the flame takes hold of wood.
“I let her go. I couldn’t give her the one thing she truly wanted in life: pups. You could give her that. You. Not me. I knew that when I was put on the pole, and I wanted to die knowing that she would get everything she wanted with you. Instead, she died.” The violent flame between them catches, burning brighter.
“You have two kids that you need to raise, and you’re here? What kind of fucking father are you? She would hate this. Raise the kids she always wanted to have.” That is savagery at its best, because it brings out the long teeth from Cassius.
“I’m raising my kids.”
“Are you? How, when you’re here with me? Grow up, Cash. Be a father. See what’s in front of you.”
Flesh lacerates, and I stumble backward.
Triggers flash, glasses slide off. The world becomes hazed. The taste of blood coats the back of my throat, and I’m hurtled back into memories that have no place in my mind.
The feeling of claws scratching over my gut, except it’s not claws, it’s silver-tipped nails that he uses to scratches lines into my skin. He pushes fingers into my mouth and calls me a fucking miracle as I lay on top of the bed, h
ealing. I try to dig, splitting nails into his skin, as the taste of iron washes down, bloating my stomach. I’m mitted with a silver collar around my throat. I’m afraid that the oxygen will rot in my lungs before I’m allowed to take another breath.
This is terror.
Can terror be both noun and verb? Can it?
“Treajure.” The afterimage of him is still pressed behind lids even when I open them up. His shadow seems to remain even when I’m looking into the blurred face of Cassius.
I have to blink a few times. Once isn’t enough to get rid of the shadows. My glasses are put back on my face, and Cassius’s bruised blues look down into mine.
“Let’s get you home.” I’m in the sanctuary of strong arms that feel like safety and the word forever.
“It’s not fair you drag her here with you. Look what this does to her. Look at her.”
Cassius says nothing back.
“You’re fucking selfish, Cash. All you can think about is yourself. That’s what killed her, you being selfish. You haven’t changed. I’ve been waiting for you to grow up and stop acting like you’re the only one who lost someone. You aren’t, but I give you all these excuses, and so does your family. It’s time, Cash, to stop making an excuse out of yourself.” Clayton is in his face, and Cassius is holding onto me with a grip I’ve never felt before. It’s as if he needs me to hold on to and not the other way around.
“At least show Treajure some respect and stop bringing her here. She shouldn’t be here. You know it, yet you still bring her as some kind of excuse to yourself.”
Cassius’s head hangs low. His shoulders have curved in as he puts me into the passenger seat.
“I’m sorry, Treajure.” There is a breach of emotion in his words. He can’t look at me.
The door shuts gently, and when we drive away, it’s the first time that Cassius leaves on his own and not dragged away with blood still clinging to the undersides of his nails seeking more violence.
Letter 6
I wrote letters to Clayton. Please give them to him. I know it will be hard for you, but please do this for me. He has a chance with Rya, to be happy, to have a family that I couldn’t give him.
The Wildflower Series Page 57